Re: BOF at pgCon?

Josh Berkus wrote:
> Jan and I can't do both a BOF on Friday and a dinner meeting on
> Wednesday. So we'd have to pick one *or* the other.
> Wednesday night won't work for attracting people other than the ones on
> this list.
> So it depends on the purpose of the meeting.
>

Clustering and replication projects are really important, right? And
there's a lot to talk about from both the development and the user side
of things. The idea that there will be one big meeting that covers
everything is looking really impractical, and I'm not so sure that's a
bad thing. It's not like we're getting 100% attendance from around the
world anyway; eventually I'd like to get more input from Marko and Hannu
on a few of these topics, just to pick the first from the regulars on
this list not in attendance that come to my mind.

We've scheduled to make some progress at the developer's meeting. I
think it's important to have a BOF session on this topic that is on the
schedule, and that all the users are invited to attend. Catering to
that audience will preclude some of the really serious tech talk anyway,
so still useful even if there's a "hackers" session (or more!) before
that. It sounds like that will include only a subset of the people we'd
like to be there, but that's how it goes. I know what Bucardo use cases
look like well enough to steer people there even if we can't get the
project's esteemed leader to attend.

From what I'm hearing here, that's all it's really practical to start
the conference with. I think further planning beyond the BOF slot will
only drive us all crazy. We can regroup in Ottawa and just all try to
be on the lookout to advance all the open projects here usefully.
Search for opportunities to have one or more informal meetings, in as
large of a subset as can be arranged, and just do it. Possibilities
include:

-Meet after Josh's talk that ends at 3:30PM on Tuesday. I'll certainly
be there by the end of that, flying in that morning. Doubt there's
anything happening in that space afterwards.

-Meet after the Developer's session on Wednesday. Josh and Jan have
other plans, and it doesn't sound like there's a definite enough
alternative to ask them to cancel over; we really need them at the BOF
instead. Maybe this one just turns into an informal session without
them, when everybody else who's arrived already gets together at the
Royal Oak to grab our registrations.

-Blow off one of the less relevant (to us!) session blocks to spend some
time on this instead, like the two I mentioned I wasn't likely to attend.

One of the reasons I tried to get the wiki page filled out better before
the conference, and that Josh started asking about "claimed" features,
was so that it's easier to figure out which features involve which
subsets of people. I intend to visit the conference with a chart of all
that I'll fill in as I find useful groups we can divert onto these
topics, and Josh takes good meeting notes too. As long as the useful
advances make their way back onto the wiki or somebody's published
project plan, it's OK if not everybody is at every discussion.

I hope to attend all the sessions here, to continue helping with the
public documentation, and I'll do what I can to help coordinate informal
meetups too. Should be a busy and productive conference for everyone.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.us